Word: conscious
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Martone uses a wide and various last of narrators in his stories, yet only one voice speaks throughout the book: the voice of the accomplice, self-conscious and self-effacing. Iypically, the accomplice relates a story which concerns a well-known name-Alfred Kinsey, John Dillinger and others. Yet despite the famous names. Martone makes it clear that the stories significance rests not in the identify of the relevant celebrity but rather in the fact of the name itself; the name which motivates the narrator to reveal. Shyly and obliquely, his own story. We, the readers, are asked...
OSCAR WILDE'S MASTERPIECE "The Importance of Being Ernest" is as self-conscious a piece of fluff as ever there was. The play, indeed, is full of references to its own triviality. When one character advises another, "In matters of grave importance, style not sincerity is the vital thing," she could be talking about Wilde's own philosophy...
...what's said but how it's said. With such a fine line separating art from reality, the success of the show depends upon the actors' ability to sustain appropriate distance from the audience and from the humor of their lines. The moment an actor shows he is conscious of the absurdity of what he's saying, the delicate veil shatters and the play falls flat. With only a few setbacks, the Dunster House production of "The Importance of Being Ernest" presents a delightfully self-contained and poker-faced version of Wilde's drawing room satire...
...only did Ghostbusters in return for a shot at the second screen version of Somerset Maugham's most gaseous novel. The laid-back eccentricity of his Larry Darrell disrupts the slick romantic parabola of the story, in a way pretty Tyrone Power never could. And provides a few conscious laughs to balance the unconscious humor that inevitably bubbles up along with its spiritual vaporings...
...that you can spare to us is measured in rubies"). And sometimes, as when the British stand virtually alone after the fall of France, he can sound frankly desperate ("Mr. President, I cannot cut the food consumption here below its present level"). Roosevelt, seven years younger, is more ebullient, conscious of his greater economic and military power, yet surprisingly wary about domestic opponents in Congress markably aloof, fending off Churchill with a ghostwritten evasion or with a quick joke. One of the great virtues of Kimball's editing is that he includes many undiplomatic first drafts that were toned...